Apparently I posted exactly nothing here in May.  Well, I’ve been training:  I plan to ride in an bicycle event from Seattle to Portland in July, and that means about 12 hours a week on the bike (and that’s fewer than I SHOULD be spending).  The rest is writing, which tends to win out over blogging.

I heard some good news today I thought I’d share:  The anthology “Tales for Canterbury” won the Sir Julius Vogel award.  What’s that, you say?  Well, I said the same thing.  But we now live in science fiction land and have the interwebs, and from them, I learned “Sir Julius Vogel was a Prime Minister of New Zealand, and wrote in 1889 what was probably the first full length Science Fiction novel by a New Zealander, Anno Domini 2000 – A Woman’s Destiny.”  It’s a fan-based award, like the Hugo’s are fan-based.  For another bit of trivia, this the first anthology I’ve been in where I shared a the TOC with Neil Gaiman, who’s wife just did the most fabulous kick-starter evah, and which I backed.  Tales for Canterbury itself is a bit of crowdfunding:  it’s a charity anthology that has raised over $2500 for the victims of the Christchurch earthquake.  A limited number of paper copies remain available. 

Oh, and about the title.  There is a certain time every year when all of the cottonwood trees in Washington send a faux snow down onto the streets and across the fields and into cyclist’s mouths.  This is that time.  I may have to figure out how many calories there are in cottonwood spores.